La. native wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

11th May 2020   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

In his 20-plus years as a professional writer, award-winning poet Jericho Brown has covered the gamut of literary genres, to say the least. Although he’s now a celebrated poet who just won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he began his career in the trenches of politics.

After graduating from Dillard University in 1998, Brown worked as a speechwriter in the New Orleans Mayor’s Office, where his duties included ghostwriting the mayor’s “welcome letters” in convention programs, and penning weekly newspaper columns, a task that required him to go to the offices of The Louisiana Weekly to drop of computer disks containing the essays.

Jump head a couple decades, and Brown has moved on from those rough-and-tumble beginnings to emerge as one of the brightest lights of African-American writing, with multiple awards – in addition to the Pulitzer, Brown has garnered the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship – under his belt.

Looking back on the entire span of his career, Brown said he’s proud of where he’s arrived.

“I can say my writing has truly come a long way,” he said last week with a hearty laugh. Brown’s most recent volume, 2019’s “The Tradition,” earned him a Pulitzer, with the Pulitzer Web site describing the book as “[a] collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.” Brown, a Shreveport native, is especially thrilled to earn the award this year, 70 years after Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize, which she garnered for her timeless “Annie Allen.”

Brown said he is more than willing to shoulder the challenge of sustaining and enhancing the rich tradition of Black poetry symbolized by Brooks’ works and honors.

“I am happy to walk in the footsteps of that standard bearer,” Brown said of Brooks.

He said poetry can be a powerful force for maintaining cultural and social stability and strength, especially with the heavy challenges being faced by all Americans in 2020. He said he wants to symbolize “an example of what it means to be a poet in the world today.”

“With these difficult times, poets have gotten a little bit of an opportunity [to make an impact] because more people are turning to it” for support,” Brown said.

“I hope I can be a kind of ambassador for poetry,” he added. “I’m here to meet those challenges as they come up.”

Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy, a folklorist and professor of English at Dillard, taught Brown while he was receiving his education and helped him nurture his abilities. Saloy said her former student’s talent rests with its evocativeness and depth.

“Jericho’s verse resonates with honest perception, with a depth of unveiling humanity from the inside,” she said. “Each line reveals images of awe and wonder about life, the difficult inquiry about caring and not caring, about longing for love and rejecting closeness while yearning as we all do. He is fearless in all of this, revealing what is most intimate and questioning through it all.”

She added that his work reflects his own roots – personal, ancestral and cultural.

“His work pays homage to his ancestry in Louisiana, to those who raised him, loved him, and what he learned from them wonderfully.”

“Jericho is entirely original, painting joy and pain before us resonating like a good movie, memorable,” she added.

Saloy noted that Brown’s talent and ambition were already evident when he was at Dillard; he contributed to the campus literary journal, and he won second place in the first City-Wide Poetry Contest through the New Orleans Public Library.

After graduating from Dillard, Brown earned a master’s of fine arts at the University of New Orleans. Although he has since built up a packed CV – including a doctorate from the University of Houston, publication in numerous journalistic and literary outlets, and teaching stints at the University of Houston, San Diego State University and, currently, Emory University – Brown said his time in New Orleans helped him become the writer and educator he is.

He said the city New Orleans imbued him with a sense of tradition and of intimacy with the past.

“You really do feel like the people who have come and gone before are still with you,” he said.

Brown added that through his writing experiences in New Orleans and elsewhere, his consciousness as a person of color in America has continually deepened.

“You learn just how deep the history of Black history and Black resistance is in this country,” he said of his work. “As a poet, your job is not just to do what’s been done before, but to use what’s come before to create more progression forward.”

This article originally published in the May 11, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.